A Career In Three Acts

Before The Cameras, Sinatra Achieved More With His Sideline Than Many A Full-time Film Star

May 17, 1998|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune Movie Critic.

From a skinny young romantic with shining eyes and a heart-filled voice--to a buoyant playboy who knew all the angles, curves and cuties--to a tough old pro with immaculate cuffs and a voice that had permanent edges and aches-that was our shifting image of Frank Sinatra at the movies.

We don't really think of him as a movie idol. It's as the century's top pop crooner and balladeer-the man who sang "Young at Heart," "Angel Eyes" and "It Was a Very Good Year"-that he'll stay immortal.

But that's not because his film career wasn't exceptional. In fact, it is in Sinatra's movies-or, at least in the best of them, most of which were made between 1953's "From Here to Eternity" and 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate"-that our permanent image of him resides. That's where we see the way he walks and talks, his wiry frame, the cut of his shirts, the slant of his wide-sashed hats, his cocky back talk, innuendoes and short-fuse temper.

And where we first heard signature Sinatra jargon like "swinger," "mouse," "baby," "gasser" and "ring-a-ding-ding."

In movies like "Ocean's 11" and "Robin and the Seven Hoods," we meet his off-screen buddies from the Rat Pack, laid-back Dean Martin, high-flying Sammy Davis Jr., patrician Peter Lawford-even that kooky chick Shirley MacLaine-and we see how they all hang with each other, hear their rips and riffs.

Sinatra, more than any other big singer-turned-movie star, can legitimately be called a great film actor.

But if he was great, he was also tantalizingly unfulfilled. Something about movies never seemed to engage him as much as singing, and he never exceeded the potential of breakthrough performances like the ones he gave in "From Here to Eternity" or "The Man With the Golden Arm."

Over a dispute about reshooting a scene, Sinatra walked away from his best musical movie role--as doomed barker Billy Bigelow in 1956's "Carousel"--after recording all the songs.

His film career falls neatly into three phases. Until 1951, before "Eternity," he mostly played callow, romantic youths. In his three screen pairings with Gene Kelly, Kelly was the smoothie, Frank the follower. He was also an idealistic priest (1948's "The Miracle of the Bells"), the confused son of "The Kissing Bandit" (1948), and even a shy young pop singer named Frank Sinatra (1943's "Higher and Higher").

1953 to 1962 mark his vintage years. The youth matured. The kid became a killer. In movie after movie, he projected the Sinatra we know best: the hard-shell, hip but inwardly tender-hearted swinger. Even the failures of those years (like the slickly cleaned-up "Pal Joey") are fun to watch.

Then, after his last great movie, "The Manchurian Candidate," came Phase 3, when he seemed to have gone on autopilot. Though in that span he directed one film, "None but the Brave," his other movies started to look like get-togethers or parties. But they didn't swing. He played tough shamuses, natty gangsters, cynical husbands, hardball cops. The best part offered to him during that period-the original pre-Eastwood "Dirty Harry"-he turned down. Something joyless and tired had come into his movie work, as if he wanted to walk away.

If he made few good movies in Phase 1, he made frustratingly bad ones in Phase 3.

Why? Sinatra was said to dislike excessive rehearsal or more than one take. He was a natural but, unlike in his record work, only intermittently a perfectionist. He worked best for highly demanding directors: Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger and John Frankenheimer.

He won an Oscar, deservedly, for his pugnacious loser Angelo Maggio, in Zinnemann's film of James Jones' barracks-life novel "From Here to Eternity." He was even better as the heroin-addicted card dealer Frankie Machine in Preminger's movie of Nelson Algren's low-life Chicago chronicle, "The Man With the Golden Arm."

Those movies are inarguable classics. So are two others: the 1949 Stanley Donen-Gene Kelly "On the Town" (with its dancing sailors and trend-shattering New York location shoot) and Frankenheimer's exhilaratingly bizarre "Manchurian Candidate." (I'd add another: 1959's "Some Came Running," also based on Jones, with Sinatra as a hard-living novelist, MacLaine as a heartbreaker-floozy and Martin as the gambler who never takes off his hat.)

Though we can be impatient with the younger movie Sinatra and disappointed in the older one, there is something remarkably personal, candid and cohesive in the whole lifelong concert. When we see the tired old guy with his scars and his sad eyes, we remember the radiant young man afire with romance-and, between them, the winner with all the plums in his pocket, sittin' on top of the world. In movies, as in record studios or Vegas stages, no one sang a torch song like Frank. Maybe that's because no kid ever wanted love so bad, won it so big or mourned it so beautifully.